Our world is heating up, droughts are taking a toll on farmers and the people you serve with Esperança are among the hardest hit. The farming community of Sayhua, Peru was in dire straits. With rain becoming more and more unreliable, irrigation is a must to keep crops growing and food on the table. But that was the problem.
Sayhua’s irrigation system was in such a state of disrepair that less than 5% of the water fed into the system reached the farmers who needed it. With no government help forthcoming, this community needed a miracle. What they got was Esperança!
“When Esperança arrived, they helped us wake up our community,” says Alejandro Cabrera Peña, a farmer in Sayhua. “They trained us in production and management of our resources. They helped us work our plots, improving capacity and expanding the cultivation area. Most importantly, they helped bring everyone’s attention to the lack of irrigation water and what that would mean for our future. As an assembly we all agreed to work together to fix the problem.”
The community got to work digging trenches, laying the new pipe your support made available and connecting it all together in order for lifegiving water to flow once more. Doing the construction themselves (under the guidance of Esperança), empowers community members to take charge of maintenance and repairs, and supplies them with the tools and knowledge they need to keep the system from falling back into a state of disrepair.
“We were forgotten by our authorities, but now with the help that Esperança gave us, all irrigation users have water in our plots once again,” says Veronica Urbina Layme, another farmer beneficiary. “We’ll be able to bring to market healthy and quality vegetables and improve our future. It has showed us what we can accomplish when we work together.”
